In this interview and podcast, the director discusses his astonishing new film, "I'm Not There," and that elusive shape-shifter, Bob Dylan.
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Anyone who has ever listened to even three or four random Bob Dylan records knows that the mythical creature we call Dylan couldn’t possibly be just one person. So in the ambitious and extraordinary “I’m Not There” — not a biopic but a dream-world meditation on the idea of Dylan — Todd Haynes has cast six actors, each of whom plays a different vision of the performer we all only think we know. Among them are Christian Bale, the earnest, righteous protest singer; Ben Whishaw, the mischievous poet who seems to have been whisked in from another era; Marcus Carl Franklin, the 11-year-old drifter who idolizes Woody Guthrie; and, in one of the finest performances of her career to date, Cate Blanchett, the neurotic, sexually charismatic performer who, circa 1965-1966, was only just beginning to realize that the people who claimed to love him so much were also capable of tearing him apart.
With “I’m Not There” (the title says it all) Haynes celebrates Dylan’s elusiveness, his refusal to fit into the neat little boxes we try to cram him into. I spoke with Haynes in Toronto in September, where he talked about Dylan as a shape-shifter, a mischief-maker and a perennial source of astonishment. (Listen to a podcast of my interview with Haynes here — and click here to read my full review of “I’m Not There.”)
The idea of Bob Dylan is so outsized that when people talk about him they generally break him down into periods — “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” Bob Dylan, the “Blood on the Tracks” Bob Dylan. And what you’ve done is broken him into different people, which is such a brilliantly simple idea that I can’t believe no one has done it before. How did this idea evolve?
It was just plain on the page. When you really decide to look at the biographies and the accounts of him in the ’60s, if you just read a few of them, they all line up in that idea. And you hear testimony of people saying that they hung out with him in August of ’63, and then in November of ’63 he was a different person. Like he had shape-shifted right in front of their eyes.
And you can hear it in the records, and you can see it much more clearly in these radical breaks, like when he plugged in electric [at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival], or when he became a born-again Christian, or when he had his motorcycle crash and ducked out into the woods for several years. But it felt like the only way to really get to some core truths about this fascinating guy.
As you know, there are a lot of people who are constantly trying to get to that truth, kind of scrabbling at it. There are people who really burrow into Dylan lyrics, thinking, “All the secrets must be in the songs!” And who’s that guy who went through his garbage? Like, “The truth will be found in the garbage!”
But then on the other end of the spectrum you have people like Greil Marcus, who realize that the music is finite, it doesn’t change, but the context around it is changing constantly. That’s kind of the approach that I saw coming through in your movie. The music is the anchor, and everything else is moving around it.
Yeah, the characters are totally committed to their moment, and their ideas, and the world they’re in. And the songs they produce are the total and complete products of that commitment. And yet they are completely in dispute with the other selves and the other songs around them. So there’s a kind of dialogue going on internally between all of these absolute and total commitments to an idea or a position or a moment.
But the thing is too, what’s so crazy about Dylan today is, that he’ll go out and take these songs that are absolutely true to their time, perhaps, and to their inspiration and their moment, and he will reinvent the way they sound. So even the associations that you bring to them, and the desire to preserve something and keep something intact, are once again destroyed by him. Because he needs to be invigorated and break out of the Bob Dylanness of himself — break out of the fixedness that everybody wants to attach to him.
I also think the thing about identity that’s so interesting is that we strive to be affirmed somehow by identifying with something else. We strive to be rewarded — it’s like our own completeness is rewarded by identifying with somebody else’s completeness. And Dylan is such a strong presence and voice and articulator that a whole generation, and more, have sought that from him.
But he so refuses to give that completeness back. And it only makes the desire for it all the stronger. I posit in the movie that that’s what freedom is. Freedom isn’t about being fixed, about finding out who you really are and staying put your whole life, finding out that you have a stable self, a completely cohesive being or something. No, we’re always shifting and changing and adjusting and altering who we are, all the time. It’s a constant state of creation. And Dylan makes that a life practice. He makes that whole idea of rejecting fixity, of rejecting holism, a gorgeous life work. And it’s something that throws that whole idea of identity out the window. But at the same time he so frustrates the desire for that [identity] that it keeps regenerating itself.
And, oh man, those Dylan guys!
I know, right?
You go to parties with these guys and they stand around and talk about bootlegs all night, and catalog numbers, and what he was doing on Jan. 14, 1963.
Oh God! [Laughs]
I always wonder, with all that information in their heads, do they have any room for the music?
Exactly. And how opposite that is from him, the person they love and fetishize so completely.
I felt so exhilarated watching this movie, beginning with the credit sequence. Some of Dylan’s music is very serious, and people approach it very reverently. But watching that opening, I remembered there’s so much joy and pleasure to be had in this music. He plays around a lot. He’s always goofing around — not even just wordplay.
Oh my God, totally. There’s a mischievousness, and there’s incredible wit and humor. I don’t think he thinks of himself as some intensely serious guy who’s really heavy and should be analyzed and contemplated, and so highly regarded every step he takes.
I really think that that humor is just something that has been so evident from the very first record, with the talking blues songs that are so witty and funny, to the most recent recordings, where it’s a whole other Dylan. It’s this droll old man, with these wisecracks.
Aleeeecia Keeeys …
[Laughs] Exactly! But that’s been consistent through his entire career. To me, that’s a testament to his brilliance and his intelligence — his ability to play around and goof around, to be able to throw things up in the air and see how they fall.
Of course, he’s had his moments of intense seriousness and righteousness. I kind of put those together in the character of the Christian Bale story, [where there's] this kind of intense commitment to a sort of doctrine, whether it’s that of the New Left in the folk era, or that of the born-again Christian in his Christian period, where all of a sudden he had the answer. And he was going to tell us what it was, as beautifully and passionately and emotively as he knew how. In both cases, amazing music came out of those convictions. There was a fixity, there was a righteousness, there was a lack of humor to both those periods of music. But they were very specifically lived. They do not cast oppressive shadows across his career. They were things he went right into, and then right out of.
It struck me that you’ve chosen one of the most beautiful actresses we’ve got to play Dylan in the period when he was the most beautiful. I look at him from that period — ’65, ’66 — and he’s such a brat. There’s a part of me that resists him. I think, Can’t you just be a little bit nicer? You don’t always have to be an asshole. But, given the chance to sleep with him at the time, I would have. I know millions of people have felt that way. Obviously, you knew you wanted different people to play Dylan. Was there ever a point where you just decided you wanted to cast a beautiful woman?
I do think he’s beautiful at that period. But I was really more after the strangeness of what he had become as a man at that moment. How he was androgynous, but not in the way David Bowie would be androgynous a few years later, in the early ’70s. It was almost more the way Patti Smith was androgynous. He was just this otherworldly creature. This otherness had crept into him completely by that point.
It’s not like he is in [the 1965 D.A. Pennebaker documentary] “Don’t Look Back.” It had already progressed to this degree where he was really almost disturbingly skinny. And the hair was wildly outsized in proportion to the rest of his body. And his hands would just fly up in these crazy, fingernail-driven gestures while he’d play piano and talk, and how he was just fidgeting. And I was thinking, What would that have possibly been like to an audience in 1965, ’66 — when the Beatles were still sweet, and little Munchkins, you know? This guy was dangerous and fascinating and erotic but in a completely unsoft way. He also drew off the hostility and animosity that he’d generated by plugging in electric. It fueled him, and he struck back. The vengefulness of his feelings toward his audience, toward American culture and English culture, only seemed to propel him to do even more great songwriting and incredible recordings. That is just a moment that has become so canonized that I feel we’ve lost the shock value, and the genuine risk that it must have generated.
On a purely superficial level, I just wanted a woman’s body to occupy that place, so that this strangeness could come back. But then Cate does something to it that takes it in so many more subtle and beautiful directions — where you can really watch this character exist on-screen, for his humor, for his unpredictability, as a love object, as an artist. Just the layers of subtlety that she brings to it are so profound and so incredible.
I’m so lucky with my actors, I just can’t believe it. I was lucky with my creative team as well — they really rose to the occasion and did so much with so little. But the actors did so much with so little, too. Because they’re all on-screen for relatively shorter amounts of time than they usually are, as lead actors.
And trusting you, too, because they had no sense how it was going to come together.
Yeah, and trusting a really difficult script that reflects the complexity of the structure [of the movie], without any of the fun of the fact that it’s music-driven and has a rhythm. But you can’t really get that on the page when I describe things so ornately, the way I do. The fact that it really came together this beautifully is miraculous.
Sundance: A great gay film, or just a great film?
Ira Sachs' "Keep the Lights On" offers a fearless portrait of the realities of gay love in 21st-century New York
(Credit: Sundance)
PARK CITY, Utah — When we first meet Erik (Danish actor Thure Lindhardt), the New York documentary filmmaker who is the protagonist of Ira Sachs’ film “Keep the Lights On,” he’s got his hand down his pants and is describing himself to a stranger on a phone-sex line. (It’s 1998, so yes, such things still exist.) What he says is pretty accurate — 5-foot-11, blond and handsome, “masculine” — although we never get to confirm the “six-and-a-half inches, uncut” part. “Keep the Lights On” has plenty of explicit gay sex, but no NC-17 material.
That’s quite an introduction to a character, especially considering that Erik is evidently based on Sachs himself, an indie-film stalwart best known for the 2005 Sundance prizewinner “Forty Shades of Blue.” Sachs has made no secret of the fact that “Keep the Lights On,” the story of a long-running and tormented relationship, is drawn from his own life. (His ex-boyfriend is well known in the New York publishing world.) But this isn’t an excuse to issue apologias or vent personal grudges; it’s a loving but entirely fearless portrait of gay urban life at the turn of the millennium, seen through the prism of one dysfunctional love affair. In fact, this movie may test how far the gay community has come on issues of self-representation. While it seems unlikely that bigots and homophobes would actively seek this film out (except, you know, on the sly and stuff), any who do see it could certainly cherry-pick details to support the thesis that Erik’s entire cadre of humanity are degenerates.
As seen over the course of an on-and-off decade together, Erik and his boyfriend Paul (Zachary Booth) — a lawyer who is at first closeted, with a girlfriend — drift in and out of substance abuse, compulsive promiscuity and at least the outer margins of mental illness. Paul has a habit of disappearing for days or weeks on crack benders; on one such occasion, Erik tracks him down in a midtown Manhattan hotel room and holds Paul’s hand while he has sex with a male prostitute. (As I said earlier, there’s no full-frontal nudity in this film, but Sachs is frank about the messy realities of man-on-man sex in a way rarely or never seen on-screen before.)
I should save a full review of Sachs’ magnum opus (and that’s what it is) for a later occasion. But let me assure you that whatever else “Keep the Lights On” may be — scathing self-portrait, old-school NYC independent film (shot on super 16, not HD video!), showcase for two marvelously liberated performances — it’s absolutely not a freak show. Erik and Paul are complicated, confidently realized creations, and there’s plenty of human commonality to be found in their relationship, no matter what gender you are or whom you go to bed with. But Sachs has clearly decided that there’s no point in pretending that gay society and sexuality aren’t distinctive in many ways. (I’m a great admirer of Lisa Cholodenko and “The Kids Are All Right,” for instance, but that’s a movie predicated on the idea that gay marriage is fundamentally not different from the heterosexual variety.)
Like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” another recent film that feels like a step forward or a step away from the “queer cinema” of the ’90s, this isn’t a movie about identity or coming out or facing oppression. It’s an unstinting relationship drama — perhaps consciously modeled on Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” — about two guys who fall in love in the most tolerant and diverse metropolis in America, surrounded by supportive gay and straight friends, and manage to screw it all up with drugs and craziness and horndoggery. You could choose to interpret the movie as being about how people like Paul and Erik are ghettoized by an uncaring, heterocentric society or whatever, but frankly there’s nothing like that in the film. (One way to understand the title, as Sachs explained after the screening I attended here, is as a commitment to revealing everything and hiding nothing.)
Beautifully shot by Thimios Bakatakis, with songs by underground New York musical legend Arthur Russell (who died of AIDS in 1992), “Keep the Lights On” is an instant landmark in gay cinema, and easily the finest dramatic film I saw at Sundance this year. (Possibly that’s damning with faint praise — but it’s still good!) Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it’s the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it’s done right.
Pick of the week: Surviving a parents’ nightmare, with wine and sex
Pick of the week: A young couple faces their son's deadly illness, with Parisian flair, in "Declaration of War"
Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm in "Declaration of War"
Channeling personal trauma into creative work is pretty much what artists do, as Dr. Freud and Vincent van Gogh could have told you. In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli’s striking and imaginative film “Declaration of War,” the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie’s virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve. What could have been a wrenching family tear-jerker, in which a young couple discovers that their infant son is dangerously ill, becomes a bittersweet tragicomedy in the classic French style, suggestive of Jacques Demy, Christophe Honoré or François Ozon. (“Declaration of War” opened the Critic’s Week at Cannes this year, and now reaches theaters just after its United States premiere at Sundance.)
Mind you, “Declaration of War” still is a profoundly affecting family drama, no matter how much artifice Donzelli piles on top of it. If you’re a parent of young children (as I am), you’ll have to use your own judgment about how much you can take. I understand why some people respond to the health catastrophes of other people’s kids by shutting them out, as if the bad juju might be infectious. That’s how the young father in the film (Jérémie Elkaïm, who is or was Donzelli’s real-life partner, and co-wrote the screenplay) reacts when another kid in their son’s hospital ward dies: Geez, that’s too bad; let’s move on. Let’s face it, every parent harbors these fears, and every time you’re waiting for a phone call from the doctor – even if it’s about allergy testing, or a strep-throat culture – you secretly prepare for the worst.
Although the story of “Declaration of War” apparently hews closely to the real-life saga that Donzelli and Elkaïm endured along with their son, Donzelli kicks it up to a mythic and slightly surreal level right away. When their two characters first meet, and click erotically, against the pounding dance-pop of a Parisian nightclub, they discover that their names are Roméo (Elkaïm) and Juliette (Donzelli). “Does this mean we’ll have a love story with a tragic ending?” he murmurs in her ear. You can view that choice as daring or way too precious; I kind of think it’s both, but by that point I had already been sucked in by the visual and auditory undertow of Donzelli’s style, and just went for the ride. (Full credit also to the spectacular cinematography of Sébastien Buchmann.)
Almost as soon as their son is born, Roméo and Juliette half-suspect something is wrong: He cries all the time, wants to feed constantly, and won’t let them get any sleep. (I would point out that most parents, especially first-time parents, go through some version of that.) But when Adam is 18 months old (and still not walking), their pediatrician notices an odd asymmetry to his facial expressions, and sends them for a neurological consultation and then a CAT scan and then an MRI. The results are pretty nearly as bad as they could be: Adam has a large tumor compressing his brain stem, which will require immediate surgery. And without giving away the whole story, the news doesn’t get any better after that.
That’s the story, and perhaps as an act of catharsis, Donzelli has chosen to tell it as a gorgeous, stylized and highly sensual motion picture. Both she and Elkaïm are gorgeous physical specimens and vividly kinetic performers, and “Declaration of War” finds delight in the most unlikely moments: Juliette sprinting down hospital corridors at high speed, as her son is being anesthetized for his MRI; the two parents riding a fairground Ferris wheel like teenage lovers, at a point when they’ve sold their apartment and quit their jobs to move into the hospital’s parents’ wing. They’re surrounded by a constellation of supporting characters who come together, Greek chorus-style, to support their struggle: Roméo’s working-class mom and her female partner, Juliette’s more bourgeois siblings and parents.
I recognize that the whole thing sounds self-indulgent, and may be so — playing a version of yourself in the arted-up story of your own child’s life-or-death battle with cancer. But the breadth and brio of “Declaration of War” are such that I never tried to resist, and I honestly believe any parent can identify with the ways Donzelli turns quotidian details – a drive to the train station, or a ringing phone at the dinner hour – into thriller-worthy moments of intense drama. Among other things, this movie is a comic and tragic exploration of contemporary European family values, one that makes clear how much is lost, and how much gained, when people are forced to face a crisis of this magnitude.
I’ll drop a big hint and say that while the ending of “Declaration of War” is heartbreaking in various ways, you don’t have to fear the most downbeat or tragic conclusion. (Donzelli and Elkaïm’s real-life son, Gabriel, appears in the film.) Instead, this is a story about two pampered young Parisians who had to grow up in one hell of a hurry and deal with something dreadful, and who were fortunate enough to live in an affluent Western country that still, even in straitened economic times, views healthcare as a right and not a privilege. (Yeah, hint, hint.) So they confronted every parent’s worst nightmare and made it through, more or less, without losing their passion for wine, sex, vigorous exercise and cheesy French love songs.
“Declaration of War” opens this week in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, with wider national release to follow. It will also be available on-demand nationwide through many cable and satellite providers, beginning Feb. 3.
Oscar-nominated director: Human nature is miserable
Agnieszka Holland, director of the Holocaust drama "In Darkness," says you can't ever expect people to do right
Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness,” an Oscar nominee for best foreign film, tells the story of a Polish thief and workingman who protects a group of Jews seeking refuge in the sewers of Lwow, Poland, during the Nazi occupation. Based on a true story that’s been told in two nonfiction books, the story examines the conscience of Leopold Socha (played by Robert Wickiewicz), a casual anti-Semite motivated by a mixture of greed, fear, anger and altruism.
Holland — whose remarkably diverse career includes two earlier Holocaust themes (“Europa, Europa,” “Bitter Harvest”), a Henry James novel (“Washington Square”), “The Secret Garden” and three episodes of David Simon’s “The Wire” – first turned down the film because its principal backers demanded that the actors speak English. She wanted the languages to reproduce the polyglot Babel of Lwow, then a Polish city and now a center of Ukrainian nationalism.
We spoke with Holland last week, ahead of the Oscar nominations, in Washington, D.C., where “In Darkness” was screened at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Many of us approach the Holocaust with a mixture of horror and wonder, it’s so inexplicable. Do you keep returning to it in film because it’s unsolvable, or because you’re trying to understand something about it?
About the Holocaust, no. About human nature, yes. In these borderline experiences of humanity you see suddenly how fragile and how strong and how miserable human nature is. Sometimes you have little sparks of greatness — but you can’t really count on them.
Your father was a Jew in the Warsaw ghetto, your mother a gentile who helped Jews as a girl. It’s a personal story for you, but you weren’t there. Do you view the Holocaust in a different way than, say, an American of your age?
I have quite a particular connection to the Holocaust; maybe it’s a mystical thing. When I hear the stories of the Holocaust, it very rarely seems new to me — it’s as if I dreamed it already. With this script, it was as if I had dreamed it already before I read about it. [Polish filmmaker Andrzej] Wajda, my friend and mentor, lived through the Holocaust as a Polish partisan. His view of the war experience is very different from the Jewish perspective. And some Jews have been very unhappy with the vision in his wartime films (“Kanal,” “Korczak,” “Samson”). His films were accurate but they were from the perspective of young Polish underground fighters.
My perspective is closer to the perspective of the Jewish survivor in some way. When I show survivors my movies or talk about their experiences, the communication is very easy. They accept my vision and I understand very well what they went through. My mother was Polish, helping Jews as a young girl. I have those two things in myself, which sometimes is very uncomfortable but at the same time gives me a more objective view. And I don’t feel any guilt.
Why did you insist that “In Darkness” be in the original languages? Does the cacophony of different languages – where the Jews are divided among those speaking Yiddish and German, the Poles speak dialect – telling you something about a vanished world?
Right. Especially I wanted the use of Yiddish and Balak (the working-class dialect of the city of Lwow, now Lviv) to reflect that diversity. Some of the characters – Socha and his partner Szczepek, and Socha’s wife and daughter – speak Lwow dialect.
What’s different about that dialect, to a Polish ear? And how hard is it to find people who still use it?
It has many differences from the classical Polish in terms of the accent and vocabulary. It was spoken by the lower classes, sort of what Cockney, or northern dialect is to English; it became the language of comedies and songs and cabaret before the war. There was a famous 1930s Lwow radio program by two guys, Szczepko and Tonko – a Jew and a Pole — they also did several movies.
Balak has different connotations to a Polish speaker. It tells you something about class, about time and place. It has some Ukrainian in it, some Czech and German and Hungarian and Yiddish. This was Galicia, once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the influences were very mixed. The language only exists today in these recordings and movies. No one speaks it anymore; it died with the generation that grew up in the war. After World War II, the Polish people left Lwow [Stalin expelled them] and it became part of the Soviet Ukraine. Today Polish people don’t understand Balak, even half of it. I had to subtitle the dialogues in Polish.
We found one person who was a really good coach, a specialist in this dialect. He made recordings for the actors, and they watched the old movies. They had to do their homework, and with the Yiddish as well. Many of the Jewish characters speak German — many Lwow Jews of this generation attended university in Lwow or Vienna or Berlin, and the upper class spoke correct literary German. And the mixture of Ukrainian and Polish was a kind of lingua franca in Lwow.
It was a pleasure to try to re-create this environment. For Americans it doesn’t make so much difference, but for Polish audiences this has been one of the great attractions of the film. People say it’s fantastic to hear all of those languages again. The richness of these languages that reminds them of how it was.
Does the city of Lwow mean anything special to you?
I come from central Poland, from Warsaw. But Lwow for many people in Poland is like the lost Arcadia. Their attachment to the city was very strong. Even in the second and third generation if someone is from Lwow he feels he’s from this special place that was taken away from us. It has this nostalgic and mythological quality. When I read the story I thought it would be great to try to create a taste of Lwow, even without showing the city — to show its spirit. We wanted to film in Lviv, but it was more expensive than Poland, and besides we had to spend our money in the places that gave us subsidies. I planned to go there for two or three days at the end, but we ran out of money.
There’s a scene where Socha, the hero, says to Mr. Chiger, “Here you are bargaining for your life. Always a Jew.” Someone might call that anti-Semitic. But Jews in places like Lwow were traders, hagglers, so in a sense, it’s a completely natural statement.
Stereotypes are always based on realities. Polish peasants learned the expression, “Give a Jew your finger, he’ll take your entire hand.” If you ask the same peasant if he hated Jews, he’d say, “No, not at all.” But of course it’s very dangerous, because in situations like this it had consequences. The Germans used those stereotypes to reinforce the feeling that Jews were not human. Stereotypes are dangerous. But that is how they existed.
The Jews in the film regard the Poles as a constant danger. And they despise Socha, the “dumb Polak.” The mistrust was reciprocal. It wasn’t something that would have spread to genocide. Of course there were pogroms against Polish Jews before the wars. But it’s same thing in the former Yugoslavia; people live together for centuries, nothing major is wrong. Suddenly one little match and everything is on fire.
At the end, Socha shouts, “Look, my Jews!” This is embarrassing and yet he’s right, in a sense.
It’s a little pathetic but poignant. The audience is laughing and at the same time crying.
The film has done very well in Poland. What do Poles of our generation or younger take from a film like this compared to Americans?
They’ve been surprisingly responsive. They take its human dimension very strongly. I think the depictions are easier to accept than to show all the Jews as angelic and the Poles as petty criminals and murderers, or as heroes, any kind of stereotypical presentation. We tried to make the film as subjective as possible. And young people love it for this reason. Audiences feel they can identify with it, with the people on both sides.
Are there any characters in “The Wire” who remind you of Polish characters you’ve worked with?
No, but I love all the characters. Bunk and McNulty, Omar of course. .. I liked Snoop, this girl. She was real – a real criminal who’d spent years in prison. It was some kind of redemption for her to be in the series. But she recently was arrested again.
I’m amazed you can go between these two worlds. Did you feel like a stranger when you were filming “The Wire“?
No, not after a while. The world of fiction is my natural world. It can be Victorian England, it can be Baltimore of today , it can be the Second World War. Of course, some settings are closer to my interest and sensitivities, and sometimes the real, you know, stories are more exciting than fantasy. I never wanted to do fantasy or science fiction. I went to New Orleans and shot “‘Treme” and after a few days I felt so close to that story. It’s very rewarding; it makes your life richer.
Chris Rock and Julie Delpy’s Manhattan romance
Interview: The comedian and the French actress talk about her new Sundance comedy "2 Days in New York"
Julie Delpy and Chris Rock
PARK CITY, Utah — Chris Rock and Julie Delpy make a striking couple. Whether appearing in person or acting together in Delpy’s new film “2 Days in New York,” their manners could hardly be more different. Rock is cool, laconic, a man of relatively few words who takes things in before reacting. Delpy is almost hyperactive, talking a blue streak, laughing at her own jokes, constantly in motion. In fact, she describes herself as “panicky and neurotic,” and “a little bit nuts.” (Oh, let’s be clear about one thing: Despite what you may read below, Rock and Delpy are not a couple in real life; both have other partners.)
Fans of Delpy’s zany 2007 relationship comedy “2 Days in Paris” will already have a good idea what to expect here, but it really doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the earlier movie. Jack, the American boyfriend played by Adam Goldberg in “2 Days in Paris,” has evidently moved on (leaving behind a young son), and Delpy’s character, Marion, is now shacking up with a Village Voice journalist and radio host named Mingus, who has a daughter of his own. (Rock even says the character is based on the prominent African-American journalists Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell.)
Rock gets some decent laugh lines, but he isn’t doing improv or stand-up material here – although he does deliver two monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama. The film’s principal source of comedy is the Franco-American cultural clash that ensues when Marion’s father (played again by Albert Delpy, her real father and a veteran French stage actor), her compulsively flirtatious sister (Alexia Landeau) and her sister’s wannabe-black boyfriend (Alexandre Nahon) all descend upon Marion and Mingus’ modest Manhattan apartment. Once again, Delpy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Landeau and Nahon, specializes in an awkward, almost abrasive comedy that pushes her characters and the central relationship to the edge of collapse, before pulling back for the requisite happy ending.
I sat down with Delpy and Rock for a few minutes in a Park City café, the day after the Sundance premiere of “2 Days in New York.” In an earlier conversation, Rock had said he was eager to push into strong dramatic roles. “I think you have to do something strong if people are used to seeing you be funny. I’d have to do something where I was a killer, or a transvestite. A transvestite killer, maybe. Something where I get to really act.”
You know what’s funny in your movie? Well, a lot of things. But the fact that when Alexandre Nahon’s character is trying to impress you, Chris, the only thing from black culture he can come up with is Salt ‘n Pepa. I’m not even sure why that’s funny, but it is.
Julie Delpy: Why are you talking to him? I wrote it!
I know you wrote it, but he’s in the scene. I was talking to both of you.
Chris Rock: Geez, Julie. You’re so defensive!
J.D.: It’s just that when you’re a woman filmmaker, people always think the guys have written their own dialogue.
C.R.: Right, and when it’s a comedy people always think the best stuff is ad-libbed. Always!
I think you’re right. But why do they think that?
C.R.: Probably because the best stuff in comedy always is ad-libbed. [Laughter.] I mean, the movie has to be written first. It has to have a structure.
So, Julie, why is Chris’ character named Mingus?
J.D.: Well, first of all it’s to honor Charles Mingus, obviously. But I thought it was a good character name.
C.R.: It’s a great character name.
J.D.: It tells you something about his parents: They were cool, New York people, they were into jazz. And then, of course, it rhymes with “cunnilingus.”
In both languages!
J.D.: In both languages. So it was perfect.
So how did you two get hooked up for this movie?
C.R.: We were sleeping together anyway.
J.D.: For a long time. And then I was like …
C.R.: Should we work together? We probably should, just to throw our significant others off the track: “You guys are sure having a lot of meetings!”
J.D.: How did it happen? [Reacting to a sudden sunbeam.] Oh, I hate the sun! Can you stand the sun? I like to be in the shade.
C.R.: I’ll sit in the sun. I need it. I’m a flower, I need sunlight and water. [They change places.]
J.D.: I hate it. I’m a radish, or maybe a mushroom. I like the basement. Basically, when I decided I wanted to write something continuing the character of Marion and her family, I thought I couldn’t do a sequel with the same guy. It would be too much like “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.” And I thought that Marion was the kind of girl where it might not work out with Jack anyway, so I thought, oh, she has a new boyfriend. The first person that came to mind was Chris. I knew his work and I loved his work. I had met him briefly at an Oscar event when I was nominated for the “Before Sunset” screenplay. I loved his energy, and I thought, oh, that’d be an interesting couple, that sounds really cool and fun. So I called Chris’ agent, who told me: Write a good script! Don’t write a bad script!
Chris, you were saying earlier that you don’t get offered that many acting roles, except as, you know, being the cut-up.
C.R.: Yeah, I mean, people want me to perform, kind of. I don’t get a lot of things like this – this is like a well-rounded part, you know? I jump on any well-rounded part.
How different or similar is Mingus to you, do you think?
C.R.: I mean, I’m a father. I’m married, I have kids, I have in-laws, so I can relate to the whole thing.
J.D.: His in-laws are obviously not …
C.R.: Not French, right. My in-laws are from Oakland. You ever been to Oakland?
I have. I grew up in Oakland!
C.R.: Right, there you go. So you know, from Brooklyn that’s a whole different thing. But, you know, there’s a lot of levels on which I can relate to this guy.
How much of this story is autobiographical for you, Julie? With your real dad playing your dad in the film, there’s got to be something.
J.D.: Well, there’s the stress of having a family and being an artist without totally selling your soul – and Marion does sell her soul, literally. How do you keep on going as a mother, artist and writer? And then there’s the question of mortality. She loses her mother, and I lost my mother not long ago. I had to deal with that, I had to get it out somehow.
I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable moments in my life, a lot of moments where you’re with someone and then it suddenly falls out of place, like a Rubik’s Cube that gets turned one way and then it all goes wrong. At the moment it happens it’s very painful, but then when you look back it’s kind of funny, as long as no one dies in the mix. It’s happened to me a lot – I’m a panicky, neurotic person, so I get in crazy situations.
Awkwardness is one of the most basic elements of comedy, and you push that pretty hard in this film. Maybe never harder than the scene when Mingus and Marion’s father go to get a massage together. I mean you guys were stuck doing a scene, and you barely speak a word of each other’s language.
C.R.: It really was kind of awkward to shoot with a guy where we don’t speak the same language. I mean, not at all. There’s nothing. Nothing!
J.D.: The scene where my dad tickles him with a feather was mostly ad-libbed, and I could see in your eyes, “What the hell is going on? What’s going to happen?”
C.R.: Literally, you’re remembering improv class: OK, run with it! Don’t say no! Don’t panic! Someone comes up with a situation, you say, “Sure!” You gotta play along. Also, the guy I’m playing is, like, a combination of Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell. I’ve hung out with both of those guys. I met Nelson when he was working at the Village Voice, which is exactly where my character works. And they’re both very cool, they don’t overreact. So I had that to work with.
That’s funny. I thought your character reminded me of the novelist Colson Whitehead.
C.R.: I don’t really know Colson Whitehead, although I’ve read a couple of his books. It’s more Elvis Mitchell. Even the hair is, like, an homage to Elvis Mitchell.
Talk about the way Mingus talks to Barack Obama. That’s kind of a weird psychological touch.
J.D.: It was one of the first things I thought of when Chris said OK, that it would be funny to have someone who talks to a cardboard cutout of the president. Plus, it’s not about big political issues or whatever, he talks to him about his love life.
C.R.: We both love “The King of Comedy.” We’re big Rupert Pupkin fans.
J.D.: It’s my favorite film. So it was also a bit of an homage to that. You know, people say Chris is the straight man in the film, but it’s not really true. He does talk to the president. He has his own form of craziness.
That whole thing would be really, really different if Bush were still president.
C.R.: No, no. No way! Maybe Condoleezza Rice. Maybe.
It’s interesting that this movie isn’t really about the issue of interracial relationships at all. It’s just accepted, and hardly anyone talks about it.
C.R.: Because it isn’t really an issue. Show me one place where it’s still a taboo. I see it every day, and I see it more outside of New York and L.A. I see it more in the middle of the country than in the cities.
J.D.: You know, I think in film it’s still a taboo. I never thought about it when I was writing the screenplay, and I didn’t even want to bring it up in the film. It’s just old, like something from the ‘60s, or even the ‘50s.
C.R.: One of the movies I’m working on, I’m trying to get Melissa McCarthy to play my wife. I think we’d make the perfect Jerry Springer couple. But it’s kind of boring, to bring it up as an issue.
Chris, you talked earlier about going for more well-rounded dramatic parts. I could imagine a career arc like, say, Tom Hanks, where you start out in comedy and move toward more serious material.
C.R.: Well, I’ll say this: As you get older, you’re less believable in the silly stuff. You kind of have to start acting or die, more or less. Tom Hanks can’t be in “Bachelor Party” anymore, you know what I mean? You’re gonna have to have a wife, you’re gonna have to have some kids, you’re gonna have to be in relationships. You’re gonna have to be a real person to work. And I want to work. So bring on the real people!
Do you enjoy being a movie actor? It’s a pretty different job description from being a stand-up comedian.
C.R.: Oh, yeah. I like working; it’s fun! The acting thing is great, as long as the work is good. When you have to sell something bad, it’s awful. You know, would I rather be with my kids right now? Yes. But I’m sitting here with you, and it’s a good movie. It feels good to sell it! Do you know how horrible this would be right now if I didn’t like the movie? [Laughter.]
Salon’s Oscars picks
Time to move past the snubs and call the winners. Here's the case for Brad Pitt, Terrence Malick, "Hugo" and more
You can read the usual political-junkie analysis of Tuesday morning’s Academy Award nominations almost anywhere else, and it’s not as if anything that happened today changed the horse race too much. I’m definitely going to allow myself to ventilate a little rage against the Academy for its unforgivable omissions – chant along with me: Al-Bert BROOKS! Al-Bert BROOKS! – and for showering so much love on namby-pamby, pseudo-significant, middle-of-the-road crapola like “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” (Ask me how I feel about that movie sometime. I might tell you!)
But the Oscars we have are the Oscars we have. So I want to lobby here for who really should win now, given the unfortunate but undeniable reality that Brooks and Kirsten Dunst and Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender, et al., are out of the picture.
BEST PICTURE
Who’s in: “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” “The Help,” “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Moneyball,” “The Tree of Life,” “War Horse”
Who got snubbed: Most notably “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which just didn’t stand out enough (or make enough money). Also “Bridesmaids,” “Drive,” “Melancholia” (which recently won best picture at the European Film Awards) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” each of which is, in my oh-so-humble judgment, better than several of the nominated films.
WTF factor: “Extremely Loud”? Really? That there were nine nominations instead of six to eight is itself a pretty big surprise – but all the nominations piled up by Stephen Daldry’s treacly post-9/11 magic-healing movie makes me feel a teenage level of bile toward the Academy and its collective taste for ultra-middlebrow sentimentality. Maybe voters made up for that on the other side of the ledger by nominating “The Tree of Life,” a spiritual allegory many viewers found incomprehensible.
Who should win now: Again, this category is me voting with my heart, not horse-race analysis. We all know that “The Artist” is still in the lead, with “The Descendants” and/or “Midnight in Paris” making up ground on the outside, etc. If the Oscars are about big spectacles that combine romance, adventure, tragedy and comedy, that put all kinds of money on the screen but also demonstrate a passion for life and movies, then there’s only one choice. Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” is a grand folly, a money-loser on an epic scale, the greatest work so far done in 3-D, an adaptation of a children’s book that far outdoes its source material and an old-school Big Movie aimed at all viewers. Reward this great director for taking enormous chances when he didn’t have to, and pulling it off in a way nobody expected.
BEST ACTOR
Who’s in: Demián Bichir, “A Better Life”; George Clooney, “The Descendants”; Jean Dujardin, “The Artist”; Gary Oldman, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”; Brad Pitt, “Moneyball”
Who got snubbed: Ryan Gosling for both “Drive” and “The Ides of March,” although the writing’s been on the wall, re Gosling backlash, for some time now. It’s also not surprising that Leonardo DiCaprio (for “J. Edgar”) and Michael Fassbender (“Shame”) were left out; the latter’s day will come and the former was perfectly dreadful.
WTF factor: There were murmurs around Bichir, a terrific Mexican actor who plays an immigrant gardener in Chris Weitz’s little-seen “A Better Life” (and also had a supporting role on TV’s “Weeds”). But it’s still a big surprise – is this the first time an actor who’s also played Fidel Castro (in “Che”) has been Oscar-nominated? Gary Oldman arguably wasn’t the most memorable aspect of Tomas Alfredson’s cool, modernist “Tinker Tailor,” but it’s a nice surprise to see the movie, and his underplayed performance, get some recognition.
Who should win now: I like everybody in this category, and of course Clooney and Dujardin are the front-runners. But Academy members, this year of political discord is a good time to send a unifying message to all Americans and all citizens of the movie world. Readers of OK! Magazine and art-film connoisseurs are now joined in their love of Brad Pitt, a movie star who has (at length) revealed himself as a superb actor. Pitt personally nursed “Moneyball” through its production nightmares and near-collapse, and fills the potentially two-dimensional role of Billy Beane with tremendous humor and heart. It’s time.
BEST ACTRESS
Who’s in: Glenn Close, “Albert Nobbs”; Viola Davis, “The Help”; Rooney Mara, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”; Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”
Who got snubbed: First and foremost, Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” It’s a brilliant performance in an arty, painful, violent film that was simply too challenging for Academy voters (or many civilians) to enjoy. Also highly deserving from the indie/arty fringe are Kirsten Dunst for “Melancholia” (she won the best-actress award at Cannes) and Elizabeth Olsen for “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”
WTF factor: I suppose Mara’s nomination is a surprise, given that “Dragon Tattoo” was locked out of the other major categories. Still, she was good, and my only problem with it is the zero-sum game that booted Dunst, Olsen and Swinton to the curb.
Who should win now: This is a tough one to call, and I’m going to end up with the most conventional choice. I didn’t love “The Iron Lady,” which is a semi-coherent blend of mid-grade British political drama and soap opera, but the range and intelligence of Meryl Streep’s performance as Maggie Thatcher – bringing both her profound strength and her personality defects to life — are extraordinary. I know Streep has her haters, but we’re talking about the greatest stage and film actress of her time, who’s drawing near a late-midlife career transition.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Who’s in: Kenneth Branagh, “My Week With Marilyn”; Jonah Hill, “Moneyball”; Nick Nolte, “Warrior”; Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”; Max von Sydow, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
Who got snubbed: Albert Brooks for his comic-sinister Jewish gangster in “Drive,” and that’s a complete and total freakin’ disgrace. Everybody in Hollywood has decided they hate that movie, and that’s some cinema-studies grad student’s dissertation topic right there waiting. I know there’s a technical argument about whether Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” actually qualifies – but it should, and he belongs on the list ahead of at least three nominated actors.
WTF factor: Pretty much the whole list, except for Plummer. Oh, I have no problem with Jonah Hill, and I do understand that Branagh was chewing the scenery because he was playing noted hambone Laurence Olivier. Max von Sydow, of course, is one of the greatest actors in film history in the twilight of his career, and was easily the best thing about “Extremely Loud.” But none of them was all that great. “Warrior” doesn’t belong on a list of top-five Nick Nolte performances, but I guess it proved he could still display some vulnerability after a lengthy period of simply playing a bear.
Who should win now: Christopher Plummer as the abruptly uncloseted senior-citizen dad of Mike Mills’ underappreciated “Beginners.” Furthermore, he will win. So, no, there’s still no justice in the world, but sometimes the stars align. (And as Albert Brooks reportedly quipped this morning, he doesn’t have to attend any more events that Plummer wins.)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Who’s in: Bérénice Bejo, “The Artist”; Jessica Chastain, “The Help”; Melissa McCarthy, “Bridesmaids”; Janet McTeer, “Albert Nobbs”; Octavia Spencer, “The Help”
Who got snubbed: Well, on one hand I love everyone on this list. On the other hand, the entire movie world is shocked today that Shailene Woodley, who plays George Clooney’s eldest daughter in “The Descendants,” got left out. And while I can’t pretend to be amazed that Charlotte Gainsbourg’s tender and heartbreaking role in “Melancholia” got overlooked, she deserved to be nominated and to win (unless Woodley won).
WTF factor: Melissa McCarthy and Janet McTeer are big surprises, but in the best possible way. Jessica Chastain’s nomination is a mild surprise, but only because it’s highly unusual to see two nominees in the same category for the same film.
Who should win now: What an absolutely terrific group of women! I mean, they really don’t need to give it to Bejo, because “The Artist” is likely to win all kinds of other things and her performance is charming but slight. I’d be delighted to see any of the others crying at the podium, and my typin’ fingers were all set to go with a passionate defense of McTeer’s fearless, swaggering role as a woman passing for male in early 20th-century Dublin. But “The Help” does deserve some recognition, both as a movie and a social phenomenon, and Octavia Spencer’s brave, conflicted and righteously angry performance is the right vector for that.
BEST DIRECTOR
Who’s in: Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist”; Alexander Payne, “The Descendants”; Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”; Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”; Terrence Malick, “The Tree of Life”
Who got snubbed: Boy howdy — all kinds of people! You can start with David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Daldry, Bennett Miller, George Clooney and Lars von Trier, all of whom (except the last, of course) seemed plausible or viable at various times.
WTF factor: Actually very low. Malick’s nomination is an unexpected and pleasant surprise, and Scorsese or Allen might easily have been dropped in favor of someone else, but this is undeniably a strong and varied list.
Who should win now: I’m on the fence about “Tree of Life,” at least in terms of its ultimate significance and success, but it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience. In fact, I’m grateful that these nominations will compel me to circle around and watch it again. There’s often a lifetime-achievement aspect to the directing Oscar, and given the enormous philosophical and artistic goals of “Tree of Life,” this is really the Academy’s one chance to honor the strange, remarkable and resolutely unprolific career of Terrence Malick. Besides, don’t we all want to see whether the legendarily private Malick will actually show up? (My money’s on no; maybe he can play clarinet via Skype with Woody Allen.)
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